from Wikipedia:

Among the many positive accomplishments by USAID over the course of its history was to help bring an end to apartheid in South Africa through peaceful means.

as usual, Trump doesn’t give a shit. it’s Musk who hates it. and it’s not hard to figure out why.

I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…

yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.

there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.

you’re so out of touch, i don’t even know what to say.

be more specific - out of touch with whom, exactly?

out of touch with the ~400 voting members of the DNC?

can you name any of those 400, off the top of your head? I can’t, and I follow politics fairly closely.

the DNC itself doesn’t even publish the complete list - it had to be leaked

Some of the at-large members have been on the national committee for many terms. Those include stalwarts of the party establishment like Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Minyon Moore, and Maria Cardona, triple-hitters who have led national campaigns or party conventions, show up frequently on cable TV as political commentators, and buckrake as lobbyists and/or well-paid public speakers. Brazile is a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm” Purple Strategies, which has worked for BP, United Airlines, NASCAR, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and PhRMA. Ickes is a partner at Tiber Creek Group, whose clients include the Greater New York Hospital Association. Moore and Cardona are both partners at the Dewey Square Group, whose clients have included Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Springfield, Sony Pictures, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and which has engaged in lobbying to undermine state labor protections.

this is the problem with Democrats in a nutshell - thinking “you’re out of touch with lobbyists and political consultants” is a dunk on someone.

Martin had been the frontrunner from the beginning of the race, leveraging his relationships with the more than 400 voting members of the DNC that he forged over more than a decade of work inside the institutional Democratic Party.

real cool that 400 Democrats, all part of the existing party establishment, are the only people who get to vote in this.

from May 2024: The Struggle for Democracy in the Democratic Party

Even in the age of social media, the Democratic Party remains a stubbornly closed-off enterprise. At the top, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a private corporation, as opposed to a membership organization like a labor union, and its leaders have impunity over how they set and enforce party rules. For decades, DNC insiders have gone to war to prevent basic transparency and grassroots reform efforts from gaining steam.

from a recent Jacobin article:

“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”

and from his twitter account in October 2023, quote-tweeting Twin Cities DSA “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine”:

“From the river to the sea” is a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel.

looks like we’re in for 4 more years of the same feckless bullshit from Democrats.

in the Bush years we had “fw: fw: re: fwd: DON’T BUY GAS ON TUESDAY TO STICK IT TO THE OIL COMPANIES”

in the Trump years it seems like we’re going to have “fill out this form with your name, email address, ZIP code and phone number, and we’ll have a general strike Real Soon Now”

there is a realistic possibility of a general strike in 2028, due to planning by multiple labor unions to line up their contracts to all expire at the same time.

but this? eh. I support a general strike in principle, but I’m far from convinced that this is it.

the page that lists their “leaders” has…two dozen Instagram handles. including the follower count for each one. I’m gonna need a bit more information than that. who’s actually leading leading it? if it’s gonna be successful it ain’t gonna be a committee of two dozen Instagram influencers, I know that much.

I think Rich Uncle Moneybags is too young to be considered for such an important position in DNC leadership.

Rich Uncle should wait his turn, and the position should really go to Great-Great-Grandpa Moneybags. he’s been in a coma for 20 years but other than that he’s in excellent health and has a vision that will lead the party forward into a new era of fundraising telegrams and victory over the Whig party.

if anything Trump’s isolationist tendencies work in Palestinians’ favor, and otherwise he’s neutral compared to Biden/Harris.

I don’t even know where to begin peeling the onion of how incredibly stupid this statement is.

the genocide is (for now) over

“for now” is really doing some heavy lifting there

Netanyahu says Israel ‘reserves right to resume war’ and calls first phase a ‘temporary ceasefire’

but also, even if the ceasefire was permanent, that doesn’t mean the genocide stops.

if you bomb a bunch of hospitals, and then agree to a ceasefire, the hospitals don’t magically come back into existence.

ditto water treatment plants and similar infrastructure. Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast

a ceasefire means that the “dropped a bomb on a refugee camp” aspect of the genocide stops. the “there’s a refugee camp with a never-ending stream of needless and preventable deaths” aspect of the genocide will continue unabated.

cheers to the NZ Herald for calling a spade a spade

the cowards at the “paper of record” NY Times went with “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture”

BBC: Elon Musk’s gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny

The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

if Trump shot someone on 5th Ave these fucking lickspittles would probably give it a “President-involved shooting ignites debate over the limits of executive power” headline

there seems to be a pretty strong sentiment that TikTok users are all idiots (especially compared to us incredibly smart, sophisticated, and attractive Fediverse users) and therefore they deserve whatever happens to them.

it reminds me of the predictable response every time Florida gets hit by a hurricane, or Texas by a snowstorm, or whatever, and a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork with the same tired old “they live in a red state, fuck em, I don’t care what happens to them”.

this seems to be a consistent theme in all the reporting I’ve read:

Per the report, Biden was bolstered to run for a second term — despite fears surrounding his age and low approval ratings — by the positive 2022 midterm elections results, where Democrats retained the Senate and only narrowly lost the House of Representatives.

which really shows just how brain-dead Biden and Democratic leadership are.

yes, they did better than expected in the midterms. but they still lost the House. and Biden was not on the ballot. a college freshman in a Political Science 101 class should be able to tell you that Democrats over-performing in the midterms does not necessarily tell you much about Biden’s chances for re-election against Trump.

that boost in the midterms was in large part because of anger about the Dobbs ruling from the Supreme Court and the resulting state-level abortion bans. what did they do to capitalize on that anger? to try to focus it in a productive direction? basically nothing.

and of course, what else happened between the midterms and 2024? Israel intensified its genocide in Gaza in response to the October 7th attacks. Biden and the Democrats backed Israel, insisted on continuing to arm their military, and told anyone who didn’t like it to shut up and stop complaining - on the assumption that they had no choice but to vote for Biden regardless. then a bunch of those voters get disillusioned, stay home on election day, and Biden does the shocked Pikachu face.

Its pure speculation but

you know you can just…stop typing after that, right?

i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.

you’re making the same racist assumption that underlies the TikTok ban itself - that Chinese people are inherently nefarious, untrustworthy, always hatching schemes and plots and subterfuge.

the US does not need to be “tricked” into passing laws that are rooted in anti-Chinese bigotry. it’s basically a national pastime.

both the DMCA in the US as well as that Japanese law are implementations of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. that is why they can be discussed in a fairly interchangeable way.

Which law exactly?

the paragraph after the one you quoted answers this question:

Note that this discussion was based on Japanese law, but the same language is found in the DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)(A): “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” That law is more than 26 years old, going into effect a month after Google was founded, but the language remains in place.

from an Ezra Klein op-ed published in Feb 2024, arguing that it’s not too late for Biden to step aside, this paragraph has been wedged in my brain ever since:

I have this nightmare that Trump wins in 2024. And then in 2025 and 2026, out come the campaign tell-all books, and they’re full of emails and WhatsApp messages between Biden staffers and Democratic leaders, where they’re all saying to each other, this is a disaster, he’s not going to win this, I can’t bear to watch this speech, we’re going to lose. But they didn’t say any of it publicly, they didn’t do anything, because it was too dangerous for their careers, or too uncomfortable given their loyalty to Biden.

those floodgates are about to open, of people in the White House spilling the beans about just how mentally diminished Biden has been.

I’m old enough to remember when Democrats talked about Reagan having Alzheimer’s during his 2nd term, and criticized Republicans for forming a reality distortion field and insisting that no, everything was fine actually, Reagan was in perfect health.

They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.

consent factory go brrrrr

It’s like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.

I saw a tweet that called it a “weird deodorant museum” and that phrase is now permanently etched into my brain. it’s such a perfect description, similar to “private taxi for your burrito” for Doordash etc.

the only place that consistently has my medication

is there a Costco near where you live? if so, you might give their pharmacy a try (you don’t need to pay for a Costco membership if all you’re doing is getting a prescription)

I had similar challenges finding a pharmacy that consistently has my ADHD medication in stock. a few months ago I tried Costco based on a recommendation from my doctor, so far they’ve been able to fill my prescription every month no problem.

me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!

me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.

there’s always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat…but here comes President “only mostly dead…still slightly alive” Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and…MUH GAWD HE’S DONE IT!

tapping the “there are no good billionaires” sign

remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped “Democracy dies in darkness” on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?

I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?

And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?

oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.